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Enlightenment, Religion, and The Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay
Enlightenment, Religion, and The Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay
JONATHAN SHEEHAN
"We should not have the word 'religion' at all. When and how did it originate?" 23
asked the German aphorist Georg Lichtenberg at the end of the eighteenth century.
As his question signals, religion, as such, is an invented category of analysis. And
yet, for all of the ink spilt on the question of the Enlightenment, the issue of
religion per se has been of little interest to historians. Indeed, historians have been
content to play rather loose with this category, assuming, I suppose, that readers
instinctively recognize religion, and so explanation would incur the charge of
pedantry. However, such looseness has its perils, since it can generate useless
statements of fact. Take, for example, this bland, uninformative, yet utterly typical
formulation: "Enlightenment religion can be characterised as rational, tolerant and
non-mysterious." Even leaving aside the issue of the Enlightenment, in what sense
can "religion" be "characterised as rational"? Was it simply that a concept of
"rational religion" was invented? Or were its exponents themselves rational? In the
practice of pulpit oratory, were logical syllogisms the rhetoric of choice? Were the
articles of faith arranged in a rational manner? Were practices rationalized and
devotional exercises (prayer, sacraments, hymns) transformed into acts of the
intellect? It might mean all or any of these things, but the term itself tells us little
about the operation of religion across social, political, and intellectual boundaries.40
Many researchers working on the Enlightenment and religion—especially 24
Jonathan Clark and those followers living in the shadow of what one commentator
has gleefully called the "Clarkite revolution"—have casually taken up religion as a
"revivified form of political history." By focusing on ecclesiastical politics, by
stressing the "political valence of virtually all eighteenth-century expressions of
religion," volumes such as Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe (2001)
have put religion onto the historiographical map by unraveling the connections
between rational Dissent and Enlightenment politics, between Jansenism and
Enlightenment politics, between Pietism and Enlightenment politics, and so on.
Thus we now have a fairly rich notion of how religious heterodoxy and political
opposition intersected in eighteenth-century England, a sense of how "political
activity [became] an extension of ... religious and moral principles," and we can
certainly no longer take for granted the simple opposition between rational and
religious thought. But at what cost? In the case of Clark, it comes at the cost of
flattening religion into a politico-theological pancake, and then dividing it up
between the Dissenters and the orthodox. As a consequence, some of the most
significant religious transformations of the eighteenth century disappear.
Methodism and Evangelicalism, for example, were not signs of religious ferment
but instead simple "marks of the Church's strength and spiritual effectiveness,"
because they "inherited almost intact the mainstream ecclesiology and political
theology of the Church." Nor should we distinguish Methodism from
Evangelicalism (which would have surprised many late-century Evangelicals!),
because they share the same "political theology." In fundamental ways, Clark has
himself taken over the position of such nineteenth-century High Church
polemicists as William Van Mildert, later the bishop of Durham, who argued that
"the entire fabric of our Constitution, our Laws, and our Government" is
completely upheld by what he called "Religion." Van Mildert's abstractly political
concept of religion has become Clark's own, and the consequence is, to some
extent, impoverishment. Even for Orthodoxy, as Peter Nockles has noted, the
"exclusive preoccupation with the political dimension" divests it of "those
distinctively ecclesiastical, sacramental, and liturgical preferences" that give it
coherence as a "separate theological party." What results is a substitution: for the
"triumph of rationalism and stability," we get instead a "new kind of stability"
grounded in an "age of largely unperturbed and unproblematic faith."41
Reading religion as a form of veiled politics is perfectly legitimate and even 25
unsurprising given that, as Young has noted, "the social and cultural history" (of
the English eighteenth century in particular) "has seriously neglected religion."42
But if legitimate, it is certainly not the only way to read religion. It is with a sense
of "the religious complexity of modernity" that, for example, Leigh Eric Schmidt's
Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment recently
showed how, in the United States, the eighteenth-century sensorium became a zone
of conflict about the proper use of the ear and eye. Religion, in Schmidt's story, is a
complicated set of rhetorics (of divine presence, power, and absence) that generates
both corporeal and philosophical practices. Alternatively, one might argue, as
Darrin McMahon has in his 2001 Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French
Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity, that the "religion" to which
the Enlightenment was ostensibly opposed never even existed as such, because it
was invented by the strategic arguments against the Enlightenment generated by
the turmoil of the French Revolution. If, as Roger Chartier has argued, "the
Revolution invented the Enlightenment by attempting to root its legitimacy in a
corpus of texts," then McMahon shows the counter-revolution delegitimizing this
Enlightenment by giving it an essentially anti-religious disposition. By
"emphasizing the essential antagonism between religion and philosophie,"
reactionary clerics and aristocrats reduced the Enlightenment to "the sum of its
most radical parts while effacing the manifold religious distinctions drawn
throughout the century." Religion, in this context and for these clerics, would be an
equally fantastic category, a fictive entity to whose decline "the Enlightenment"
was dedicated.43
There is just as little need to embrace the post-1789 definition of religion, of 26
course, as there is to accept the post-1789 definition of the Enlightenment. The
choice we make is significant, however, because the kind of "religion" we examine
determines the kind of story we can tell about the Enlightenment. The irony, of
course, is that the Enlightenment was precisely the period in which the very
concept of religion underwent radical change. Before then, "religion" generally
described the ritual behavior practiced by Christians, Jews, Muslims, and pagans,
and religio was connected to the "careful performance of ritual obligations." By the
beginning of the eighteenth century, however, religion was converted from a set of
rituals into a set of propositions: "propositional religion" allowed for the
comparison of various religions by juxtaposing the content of their beliefs.
Enlightenment comparative religion and its effort to understand the common roots
of "religion" (whether in nature, humanity, or God) was born and built atop this
foundation.44 As modern researchers, we can add other visions of religion: an
anthropological one focused on ritual, a social one focused on the communities and
their practices, an ideological one focused on the doctrinal or theological content,
an institutional one that looks at clergy and their churches. Each of these visions
shifts not only the kind of relationship possible between the Enlightenment and
religion but also the story we can tell about religious transformation.
To see how categories shape stories, we need look no further than that great 27
divide in the study of religion, the one between the "internal" and the "external"
visions of religion. In the first case, historians define true religion as an internal
state reflecting the individual's relationship to God. This ideal—developed in the
eighteenth century and perfected in the early nineteenth—sees the "relegation [of
religion] to the private consciences of individual believers" as the ultimate
expression of the religious spirit.45 The explosion of what Ann Taves has called
"theologies of experience" in the eighteenth century could serve as evidence for
this shift, as could the "privatization of piety" that lies at the heart of what Jean
Delumeau has called the "christianization" of Europe in the eighteenth century, as
missionaries converted pagan practices into Christian faith. 46 In this story, the
Enlightenment is no opponent of religion. Instead, it was the element that, as Roy
Porter's Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000) puts
it, "purified and demarcated" the sacred from the profane realm. 47 It offered the
cleansing fire that purged religion of what Friedrich Schleiermacher long ago
called the "dead slag" of arbitrary customs.48
Proponents of the "external" vision could not be more scornful of this story and 28
its effort—as Richard Trexler grimly wrote—to "cauterise human experience."
Religion, for the externalists, must be defined as a "communit[y] of behaviour" and
scrutinized through the sociological and anthropological lens of practice. 49
Historians then judge the progress or failure of religion by looking at evidence of
ritual participation by the faithful, regardless of their inner beliefs. If fewer people
were going to church, this would be a priori evidence that religion is on the
decline. As the philosopher Marcel Gauchet's Disenchantment of the World: A
Political History of Religion (English translation, 1997) patently shows, this vision
of religion is far more amenable to the traditional secularization thesis. Although
the "subjective experience" of religion is an "irreducible anthropological residue,"
Gauchet argues, real religion—in which the divinity owns and inhabits "the entire
social space"—has been on the decline since the time of Moses. In this view, the
eighteenth century represented the "deepest ever fracture in history," as this decline
of religion reached its final terminus.50
Given that such radically different stories can be produced simply by shifting 29
the nature of "religion," the importance of the (pre-empirical and pre-evidentiary)
choice of definitions is clear. To put religion into dialogue with the Enlightenment,
in other words, we need to determine exactly who the partners in this conversation
are. It may very well be that "religion" in all senses cannot be related meaningfully
to the Enlightenment, precisely because the horizons of these two things were
socially and culturally distinct in the period. This is not, I hope, an invitation to
endless theoretical speculation on categories. But categories are important, in
particular in periods of historiographical transformation. And the best theoretical
platform should create the richest research program.
With that in mind, I would like to offer some provisional ideas about both the 30
Enlightenment and religion. It seems clear that if, as Pocock has suggested, we
move away from the Enlightenment as a set of doctrinal or philosophical precepts,
the research program will become much more capacious. The language of
rationalism, materialism, determinism, indeed, the entire philosophical definition
of the Enlightenment, has tended (with some exceptions) to constrain rather than
promote new research. At the same time, the language of multiple Enlightenments
has a scattering effect that threatens to deprive the category of real analytical
weight. I would suggest that rather than overly scatter or concentrate the
Enlightenment, it would be more productive to treat it as a new constellation of
formal and technical practices and institutions, "media," to borrow from Friedrich
Kittler. Such practices and institutions might include philosophical argument, but
would encompass such diverse elements as salons, reading circles, erudition,
scholarship and scholarly techniques, translations, book reviews, academies, new
communication tools including journals and newspapers, new or revived
techniques of data organization and storage (dictionaries, encyclopedias,
taxonomies), and so on. This would, in a sense, return us to some of the
"structures" that make Jürgen Habermas so popular even while abandoning the
pedagogy of the public sphere that makes him so problematic. Enlightenment is
not, in this context, value neutral, as Martin Gierl has pointed out in his excellent
analysis of the "new communication systems" generated in the eighteenth century
to deal with disagreement about theological and political truths. The very
possibility of juxtaposing a spectrum of positions within one publication, Gierl
shows, changes the manner in which theological controversy can be waged,
defusing the polemics of the seventeenth century. These media make certain kinds
of arguments possible and rob others of their structural efficacy. But they are not
inherently anti-religious, nor do they force the Enlightenment to reenact a blind
process of secularization. They are not intrinsically prejudicial to "religion,"
however understood, nor do they prevent us from treating in a nuanced way this
enormous area of eighteenth-century cultural life.51
Instead, the media-driven concept of the Enlightenment allows us concentrate 31
on precisely those places where the social, cultural, and intellectual horizons of
religion and the Enlightenment fused. Scholarly media, academies, universities,
reading societies, salons, journals, newspapers, translations: these were all places
where various entities called religion were investigated and invigorated. Religion
and the Enlightenment were wedded together, not because of any intrinsic
intellectual affinity between rationalism and mystery but because the media of the
Enlightenment were fundamental structures through which new religious cultures
and practices were created. And the creators were not just the devout, although
many were that. Instead, the creators spanned the spectrum of personal piety, some
profoundly impious, some not. Finally, the media approach allows one to clarify
the limits of the Enlightenment-religion relationship. Indeed, certain religious
domains might be, by and large, external to these media: private devotion, prayers,
certain liturgical elements, church law, and so on. Others would come into
continual contact, helping to shape and being shaped by them. Not only would this
expansion of the Enlightenment allow for a more productive scholarship on the
Enlightenment and religion, it would also, in my view, clarify the question of
secularization. Secularization would no longer be shorthand for the inevitable
(intentional or not, serious or ironic) slide of the pre-modern religious past into the
modern secular future. Instead, it would be an account of how new "religions"
were produced in and through the media of the Enlightenment. It would be an
account of how religion was made modern, how it was reconstructed in such a way
as to incorporate it into the fabric of modernity. In short, it would be an account of
cultural work.
What would such an account do for our opening scene? Would it let Berleburg 32
have something to do with Bayle? The answer, I think, is yes. For the account asks
historians to shift the way they have read both documents. Let's begin with Bayle,
whose perplexing dictionary offered its readers an alphabetical series of articles on
figures as diverse as Aaron and Attila, Sarah and Spinoza, all attended by a horde
of annotations. Traditionally, historians have asked the question, "What was the
aim of his writing?" and their answers fell roughly into two camps: either Bayle
was (with Elisabeth Labrousse) a writer whose aims conformed generally with
Christian teachings, or Bayle was a "libertine" (David Wootton) and advocate of
"Spinozism and philosophical atheism" (Jonathan Israel).52 In the former case,
historians take Bayle seriously when he professes his faith; in the latter, his texts
are read as "tactical device[s]" or as fine examples of "the art of theological
lying."53 What I am calling a media reading of Bayle would not resolve this
longstanding conflict about Bayle's religious intentions, because it would not ask
what Bayle meant. Instead, it would ask how Bayle's text functioned. Bayle's
philosophical sentiments would play a secondary role to his textual practices,
practices that, as Ernst Cassirer wrote long ago, are simply perplexing:
In Bayle there is no hierarchy of concepts, no deductive derivation of one concept, but rather a
simple aggregation of materials, each of which is as significant as any other and shares with it an
equal claim to complete and exhaustive treatment ... [H]e never follows a definite plan assigning
limits to the various types of material and distinguishing the important from the unimportant, the
relevant from the irrelevant.54
Bayle pursues this accretionary method rigorously throughout the Dictionnaire.
Beyond issues of "tactics," this method permeates all articles, religious or not. As a
dictionary, one of many that appeared at the end of the seventeenth century, the
form of Bayle's text broke the world into discrete parts, alphabetized them, and
provided running commentary. Articles did not need to cohere, nor were positions
set in stone. Instead, its form opened up horizons of interpretive behavior unknown
in the previous age.
Now the curious fact is that exactly the same logic applies to the Berleburger 33
Bible, a text that has puzzled commentators for many years. In the main, scholars
have asked the identical question they have addressed to Bayle: What does it
mean? And through a variety of strategies, they have managed to discover "a
consistent work of [theological] interpretation" hidden underneath "its variety and
its richness."55 Whatever the truth of these interpretations, however, I would
suggest that this cleansing operation actually overlooks the central work this text
performed. This was, after all, a text whose massive folio pages are crammed not
just with theological commentary but also with scores of quotations from literally
dozens of authorities. Ancients range from Aristotle to Xenophanes; moderns from
Robert Bellarmine to Athanasius Kirchner. This battalion of scholars provides
information on topics as widely varied as geography, philology, history,
philosophy, numerology, and mysticism. Leviticus 25: 13—"In this year of jubilee
each of you shall return to his property"—occasioned, for example, a rambling
explanation that relied on cabalistic numerology, mystic theology, and chronology
in order to unfold its subtle secrets.56 After providing a range of conflicting
numerological estimates for "the great restoration of all rational creatures" in the
so-called seventh jubilee, Haug offered his perplexed readers only this final piece
of advice: "we cannot in these, our fleeting times, have any correct concept of
these determined ages and eternities." So was numerology meaningful or not? Both
possibilities remained open in the Berleburg commentary, which teamed with a
brand-new translation to offer, for the first time, a new form of the vernacular
Bible, one that had little compunction about overwhelming its reader with a mass
of apparently contradictory facts.
The vertiginous effects of scholarship; the circular, doubling, and dizzying 34
annotations; the multiplication of commentaries arranged in networks rather than
hierarchies; the unresolved conflicts between various layers of notes: these were, of
course, exactly the same qualities that attended Bayle. His article "Aaron" (used,
remember, to criticize the Berleburg Bible) and its analysis of the Golden Calf, for
example, offered its readers a collage of arguments about Jewish idolatry, the
failures of the rabbinic imagination, iconoclastic Bible translations, and the virtues
of the learned, who "can keep themselves from snares, while the ignorant
cannot."57 Read as reflections of philosophical and theological programs, of course,
Bayle and Berleburg were oil and water. One was dedicated to spiritual and
mystical renewal, the other to at best a skeptical fideism and at worst outright
atheism. But read with attention to form—to their practical textual expressions—
the "Bible of the eighteenth century" had much in common with this actual
eighteenth-century Bible. In both, an apparently spontaneous accumulation of
detail breaks down and deracinates their philosophical or theological "message."
Both incorporate wildly heterogeneous collections of sources, an eclectic strategy
that put all authoritative proclamations on an equal level. Neither Bayle nor Haug
offered a key for establishing the hierarchy of authority among the sources.
Instead, their commentary was a library of materials, so much so that both men
were forced to rebut charges of plagiarism. In both cases, underlying materials
swamped the ostensible "text" (biblical passage, dictionary entry). And finally, the
formal aspects of both works prevented the reconstitution of an ostensibly unified
universe of meaning.
This sketch indicates that the main issue may not be the "influence" of 35
Enlightenment philosophy on the Berleburger Bible. This Bible had little to do
with Enlightenment philosophy. It did, however, have much to do with
Enlightenment media, which it used to reconstitute the vernacular Bible. These
media were not committed to exact philosophical positions, nor did they advance
exact philosophical aims. Instead, they were developed as techniques of collection,
presentation, and organization that proved remarkably adaptable to a variety of
different philosophical, religious, and scholarly aims. At the same time, they are
not neutral with regard to their message. Bayle was not more of an Enlightenment
figure than Haug, but he was a cannier human being, one who had a deeper sense
of the kinds of arguments sustainable within the media. Dense annotation and
conflicting notes made certain kinds of theological claims—about the organic unity
of the biblical message, for example—extraordinarily difficult to sustain. In this
sense—in the sense that the Berleburger Bible made the biblical text unstable and
set it into tension with scholarly commentary—we can consider this part of the
"work" of secularization. But the denigration of the Bible was not a foregone
conclusion here. Instead, this work involved a considerable investment in the object
it was supposedly destroying. The investment came in the form of new scholarly
practices that employed the media of the Enlightenment in order to make a "post-
theological" Bible, a Bible fresh and relevant to the modern world.58
With this final example, we can bring the story full circle back to the new histories 36
of religion that have emerged in the past fifteen years. It is no accident that the
study of religion assumed such urgency after 1989, I think, a period when the
political certainties of the twentieth century collapsed and the project of modernity
ran headlong into the haunting specters of religious politics. The efforts to rewrite
the story of the Enlightenment are symptomatic of a wider sense that religion may
not have lost its grip, in the end, on the modern social, political, and cultural
imagination. If symptomatic, however, these struggles to understand religion and
the Enlightenment also illuminate the problems faced in many fields as scholars
seek to write religion back into the story of the present. From Berleburg and Bayle,
we can see how the forms and practices of modern culture can be used to widely
divergent ends, even ends apparently antithetical to the doctrines that modern
culture assumes to be true. It is probably no accident that religion has so effectively
colonized radio and television, after all, seeing in them media whose ideological
content is not fully prescribed. From the wider literature on eighteenth-century
religion, we can see a shifting sense of the story of secularization, a story that
nearly always takes its leave from that crucible of modernity, the Enlightenment. If
the Enlightenment is no longer read as a philosophical and anti-religious
movement but rather, as some of the authors reviewed here do, as a set of cultural
institutions and practices whose relationship to religion was complicated and
diverse, then the Enlightenment no longer can provide the opening move in that
inevitable decline of religion called secularization. Secularization—understood as
the passive demotion of religion to the corners of human experience—has lost its
luster. Instead, it must be treated as a contingent and active set of strategies that
change religion over time. This is as true of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
as it was of the eighteenth. If the Enlightenment keeps its status as the cradle of
modernity, it will be less as the birthplace of secularism than as the birthplace of a
distinctly modern form of religion whose presence and power continues to shape
the present.
My thanks to Princeton University's Center for the Study of Religion and to the Indiana University
History Department for their generous support. Careful and insightful suggestions from Konstantin
Dierks, Constance Furey, Sarah Knott, Kate Seidl, Dror Wahrman, and the anonymous AHR reviewers
were much appreciated.
Notes
1
ÊJohann Friedrich Haug, Die Heilige Schrift Altes und Neues Testaments/nach dem Grund-Text aufs
neue übersehen und übersetzet (Berleburg, 1726), 3v.
2
ÊFortgesetzte Sammlung von alten und neuen theologischen Sachen (1727): 1176; Fortgesetzte
Sammlung (1731): 271; Josef Urlinger, "Die geistes- und sprachgeschichtliche Bedeutung der
Berleburger Bibel" (PhD dissertation, Universität Saarlands, 1969), 245.
3
ÊAuserlesene Theologische Bibliothek 22 (1727): 917.
4
ÊRuth Whelan, The Anatomy of Superstition: A Study of the Historical Theory and Practice of Pierre
Bayle (Oxford, 1989), 10.
5
ÊRichard Willis, Reflexions upon a Pamphelet intituled, An Account of the Growth of Deism in
England (London, 1696), 1.
6
ÊEdinburgh Magazine 2 (1758): 210–11.
7
ÊThe Court Magazine 1 (1761): 126.
8
ÊJonathan Clark, English Society, 1660–1832, 2d edn. (Cambridge, 2000), 28 (the first edition makes
no such claim); Eckhart Hellmuth, "Towards a Comparative Study of Political Culture," in The
Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, Hellmuth,
ed. (Oxford, 1990), 25; John Gascoigne, "Anglican Latitudinarianism, Rational Dissent and Political
Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century," in Knud Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion:
Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1996), 219; David Ruderman, Jewish
Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton,
N.J., 2000), 19. Nigel Aston's Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1830 (Cambridge, 2003)
and S. J. Barnett's Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity (Manchester, 2003)
unfortunately appeared too late for consideration in this essay.
9
ÊHorton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, 5 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1961–75), 3: 143.
10
ÊTeresa Watanabe, "The New Gospel of Academia," Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2000.
11
ÊOn the Ford Foundation, see the "Ford Foundation Report," Summer/Fall 1996 at
www.fordfound.org; on the Pew centers, see
http://religionanddemocracy.lib.virginia.edu/partners/pewcenters.html and www.pewforum.org. My
thanks to Princeton's Center director Robert Wuthnow for this information.
12
ÊThe report, written by Kathleen Mahoney, John Schmalzbauer, and James Youniss, can be found at
www.resourcingchristianity.org/downloads/Essays/PublicReport.pdf.
13
ÊHent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion(Baltimore, 1999), 431; Gianni Vattimo, After
Christianity(New York, 2002), 5.
14
ÊClarence Taylor, "A Glorious Age for African-American Religion," Journal of American Ethnic
History 15 (Winter 1996): 79.
15
ÊOwen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge,
1975); Margaret Lavinia Anderson, "The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic
Revival in Nineteenth-Century Germany," The Historical Journal 38 (September 1995): 648. See also
Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton,
N.J., 1996); David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany
(Oxford, 1993); and earlier, Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany
(Princeton, 1984).
16
ÊChadwick, Secularization, 9.
17
ÊJohn McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998), 2: 306–
07.
18
ÊMcManners, Church and Society, 2: 306, 1: 3.
19
ÊMcManners, Church and Society, 2: 288, 2: 306, 1: 4.
20
ÊB. W. Young, "Religious History and the Eighteenth-Century Historian," The Historical Journal 43
(September 2000):857.
21
ÊPeter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Vol.1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York,
1966), 330–31; Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge,
Mass., 1985), 252–53; Johann Lorenz Mosheim, "A Brief Sketch of the Ecclesiastical History of the
Eighteenth Century," in Ecclesiastical History (Philadelphia, 1798), 6: 6; Anti-Jacobin Review 1 (1799):
506; Anti-Jacobin Review 7 (1801): 25; Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment, John Cumming, trans. (New York, 1972), 7, 9, 12–13.
22
ÊOn legitimacy, see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).
Blumenberg criticizes boththe argument that legitimacy of the modern age depends on its "worldliness"
and the corollary argument that, by revealing the religious foundations of the modern age, one is
somehow divesting it of its legitimacy (17).
23
ÊPace J. G. A. Pocock, "Within the Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy," in The Margins of
Orthodoxy, Roger Lund, ed. (Cambridge, 1995), 37; S. J. Barnett, Idol Temples and Crafty Priests: The
Origins of Enlightenment Anticlericalism (New York, 1999), 7.
24
ÊRobert Sullivan, "Rethinking Christianity in Enlightened Europe," Eighteenth-Century Studies 34,
no. 2 (2001): 299; Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds., The Enlightenmentin National Context
(Cambridge, 1981), vii; Gay, Enlightenment, 3; Roy Porter, "The Enlightenment in England," in Porter
and Teich, Enlightenment, 6; Joachim Whaley, "The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany," in Porter
and Teich, Enlightenment, 111; Simon Schama, "The Enlightenment in the Netherlands," in Porter and
Teich, Enlightenment, 55; Samuel Taylor, "The Enlightenment in Switzerland," in Porter and Teich,
Enlightenment, 80.
25
ÊDavid Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley, Calif., 1996), xxi,
154–55.
26
ÊIsaiah Berlin, "The Counter-Enlightenment," in Berlin, et al., The Proper Study of Mankind: An
Anthology of Essays (London, 1997), 263, 249; C. D. A. Leighton, "Hutchinsonianism: A Counter-
Enlightenment Reform Movement," Journal of Religious History 23 (June 1999): 176; B. W.Young,
Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998), 44, 121.
27
ÊJ. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764
(Cambridge, 1999), 298, 10, 298, 253, 298, 66, 73.
28
ÊPocock, Barbarism, 138–39, 306; Knud Haakonssen, "Enlightened Dissent: An Introduction," in
Haakonssen, Enlightenment and Religion, 3.
29
ÊClark, English Society, 9.
30
ÊClark, English Society, 339.
31
ÊBlumenberg, Legitimacy, 3; Clark, English Society, 11, 10.
32
ÊPocock, Barbarism, 138.
33
ÊSuzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1990); Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-
Century France (Princeton, N.J., 1986); Dale K. VanKley, The Religious Origins of the French
Revolution: From Calvinto the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 136 (see also
his Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757–1765 [New Haven, 1975]); David A.
Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
34
ÊBell, Cult of the Nation, 296.
35
ÊJohn Robertson, "The Enlightenment above National Context: Political Economy in Eighteenth-
Century Scotland and Naples," The Historical Journal 40 (September 1997): 671.
36
ÊPocock, Barbarism, 252; Jonathan I. Israel, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making
of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), 4, 12, 159, 80, 108. See pp. 137, 140–41, for criticisms of
Pocock and his theory of multiple Enlightenments.
37
ÊIsrael, Radical Enlightenment, 4.
38
ÊNorman Hampson, "The Enlightenment in France," in Porter and Teich, Enlightenment, 41–42.
39
ÊChadwick, Secularization, 17.
40
ÊGeorg Lichtenberg, "Sudelbücher," in Schriften und Briefe, Wolfgang Promies, ed. (Munich, 1968),
1: 671; Martin Fitzpatrick, "The Enlightenment, Politics and Providence: Some Scottish and English
Comparisons," in Haakonssen, Enlightenment and Religion, 64.
41
ÊJames J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832
(Cambridge, 1993), 36; Young, "Religious History," 859; Dale Van Kley and James Bradley, eds.,
"Introduction," Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe (Notre Dame, Ind., 2001), 37; John Seed,
"'A Set of Men Powerful Enough in Many Things': Rational Dissent and Political Opposition in
England, 1770–1790," in Haakonssen, Enlightenment and Religion, 163; Clark, English Society, 285,
294; Mildert quoted in Clark, EnglishSociety, 426; Peter Nockles, "Church Parties in the Pre-Tractarian
Church of England 1750–1833: The 'Orthodox'—Some Problems of Definition and Identity," in The
Church of England, c. 1689–c. 1833, John Walsh, etal., eds. (Cambridge, 1993), 339; Jeremy Gregory,
"The Eighteenth-Century Reformation: The Pastoral Task of Anglican Clergyafter 1689," in Walsh,
Church of England, 68.
42
ÊYoung, "Religious History," 859.
43
ÊLeigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, andthe American Enlightenment
(Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 30; Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-
Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001), 101; Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins
of the FrenchRevolution (Durham, N.C., 1991), 5; McMahon, Enemies, 101.
44
ÊJonathan Z. Smith, "Religion, Religions, Religious," in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Mark C.
Taylor, ed.(Chicago, 1998), 270; Peter Harrison, "Religion" and the Religions in the English
Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990), 25–26.
45
ÊBell, Cult of the Nation, 37.
46
ÊAnn Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religionand Explaining Experience from
Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J., 1999), 47; Kaspar von Greyerz, Religion und Kultur: Europa 1500–
1800 (Göttingen, 2000), 285; Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire (Philadelphia,
1977).
47
ÊRoy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London, 2000), 205.
48
ÊFriedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Richard Crouter, trans.
(Cambridge, 1988), 194.
49
ÊRichard Trexler, "Reverence and Profanity in the Study of Early Modern Religion," in Kaspar von
Greyerz, ed., Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (London, 1984), 256, 253.
50
ÊMarcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton, N.J.,
1997), 163, 8, 162.
51
ÊFriedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, Calif., , 1990), esp. chaps. 1–3 and pp.
229–39; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.,
1989), esp. part 2; Martin Gierl, Pietismus und Aufklärung: Theologische Polemik und die
Kommunikationsreform der Wissenschaft am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1997), 415. The
recent effort to define the Enlightenment as a republic of letters—structured by "social and discursive
practices and institutions"—could easily be encompassed by the media definition of the Enlightenment:
see Dena Goodman, Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1994), 2; also Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters,
1680–1750 (New Haven, Conn., 1995).
52
ÊElisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1963–64); David Wootton, "Pierre Bayle,
Libertine?" in M. A. Stewart, ed., Studies in Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy (Oxford, 1997);
Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 339.
53
ÊIsrael, Radical Enlightenment, 339; David Berman, "Deism, Immortality, and the Art of Theological
Lying," in J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment (Newark, N.J., 1987).
54
ÊErnst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Fritz Koelln and James Pettegrove, trans.
(Boston, 1951), 202.
55
ÊMartin Brecht, "Die Berleburger Bibel: Hinweise zu ihrem Verständnis," Pietismus und Neuzeit 8
(1982): 199.
56
ÊHaug, Die Heilige Schrift, 1: 542.
57
ÊPierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 3dedn. (Rotterdam, 1720), s.v. 'Aaron.'
58
ÊOn the invention of the post-theological Bible, see Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible:
Translation, Scholarship, Culture (forthcoming, Princeton, 2004).